Portuguese Mercenary Networks in Seventeenth-Century India: An Experiment in Global Microhistory and its Archive

Thousands of runaways left the Portuguese empire during the early modern period, but very little is known about the lived experience of this diverse group of individuals after they fle d. This article questions the framework of analysis that reduces such a complex social phenomenon to the overarching category of “i nformal empire,” while testing the hypothesis that the issue of the archive lies at the core of the practice of global microhistory. A set of primary sources in Portuguese, Dutch, English, Marathi, and Persian is analyzed at close range to reconstruct the choices, motivations, and hesitations of a specific group of “P ortuguese” – mostly dark-skinned mestiços of modest origin – who served as mercenaries in north-western Deccan. I argue that studying the networks of these mercenaries ultimately reveals localized forms of endurance and adaptation to rapid and disruptive changes brought about locally by imperial rivalry and long-distance commerc e.


Introduction
of India, about one year earlier, together with a smaller vessel.The latter soon wandered away.After a stop in Pernambuco, Brazil, it was intercepted by a Dutch fleet and its captain and other crew members were killed.Meanwhile, the Calvário was held back by storms around the Cape of Good Hope for three and a half months before reaching, in a wretched state, the port of Luanda, in Angola.1 The water damaged a significant part of the cargo but spared a case file deemed worthy "of great consideration," which the inquisitors of Goa were sending to their superiors in Portugal.2When the Calvário finally arrived in Lisbon, all eyes must have been on its main passenger, Dom Francisco da Gama, the outgoing viceroy of Portuguese Asia (r.1622-1628) who was returning to the kingdom under arrest.We can imagine, however, an agent of the Inquisition squeezing through the crowd on the dockside to reach the carrack and collect the annual correspondence and other papers from Goa, including the case file mentioned above, which would have then been swiftly delivered to the ministers of the Holy Office.
This article has an inquisitorial record at its core.I will comment extensively on the man to whom the case file refers, Gaspar Gomes de Faria, a mestiço of Portuguese and Indian ancestry.3 Originally from the Portuguese littoral settlement in Chaul, where he once had been a horse dealer, Gomes spent seventeen years in a neighboring sultanate, in which he served in various military and administrative roles before returning to Portuguese territory in 1625.My intention is not to tell the story of his life.I will instead focus on the networks of individuals like Gomes in a frontier zone where cross-cultural relations were the norm.The early seventeenth century saw global empires and local polities strenuously competing in western India (Figure 1).It was a time when fragile sultanates in the north-western Deccan, such as Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, were developing flexible strategies to cope with the advance of the Mughals from the north, while the penetration of the Dutch and English East India companies (the VOC and EIC, respectively) posed a further threat to the Portuguese cities and outposts on the Konkan coast and their trade interests.4In this context, many "Portuguese" -a fluid category which extended to those born in India from Portuguese parents as well as to mestiços -deserted and offered military services to local overlords.5Gaspar Gomes was one of them.
According to a commonly held interpretation, a large and varied movement of Portuguese runaways led to the creation of a "shadow empire" in the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia.Their number may have been as high as a few thousand in the early seventeenth century.We are dealing with people of many different sorts, such as soldiers, criminals, and convicts, often bringing with them enslaved people from East Africa and India.Mostly dark-skinned mestiços who had never been to Portugal, these runaways usually married native women and had children by them, converted to Islam or Buddhism, and learned to speak the languages of the region where they lived; their descendants were eventually absorbed into local society.Some of them kept loose relations with the Portuguese empire, typically fostering commercial links.6 Very little is known about the lived experience of Portuguese runaways after they fled.7 Nevertheless, some scholars go as far as to argue that, taken collectively, fugitives, mercenaries, and smugglers came to constitute the "free agents" of an "informal empire," which was at the center stage of the Portuguese overseas enterprise as a whole.They are said to have belonged to "a borderless, self-organized, often cross-cultural, multi-ethnic, pluri-national and stateless world."Such a model postulates a "structural role" of faceless human beings incessantly engaged in establishing networks in order to overcome the constraints of laws and institutions, which only existed to be circumvented or exploited.8This is precisely the sort of abstract generalization that microhistory is expected to question through a fine-grain analysis aimed at reframing the approach to historical phenomena.9 The choices made by runaways and their trajectories are particularly difficult to reconstruct.What makes Gaspar Gomes's case file unique is the degree of detail it contains about the strategies, voices, and feelings of Portuguese mercenaries in the service of Malik 'Ambar, a formerly enslaved Abyssinian who became the regent of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate of Ahmadnagar from 1607 until his death in 1626.Malik 'Ambar seized power in the aftermath of a major loss of territories inflicted by the Mughals.Occasionally enjoying the support of his neighboring sultan, Ibrahim 'Adil Shah II of Bijapur (r.1580-1627), he was able to resist Mughal military pressure for almost two decades.10We may wonder what locality and network meant to those Portuguese who moved back and forth across the borders of this unstable region, adjusted to the varying demands and seasonality of the Indian military labor market, and forged new bonds within alien societies, yet at the same time maintained close links with their communities of origin.11 An inquisitorial document necessarily provides an incomplete picture of the actions of Portuguese mestiços in the Deccan sultanates, so profoundly different from the trading settlements of the shadow empire west of Cape Comorin.I began this article with the story of the disrupted travel of Gomes's case file from Goa to Lisbon precisely because the experiment in which I will engage is aimed at testing the hypothesis that the issue of the archive and its boundaries lies at the core of the practice of "global microhistory."I argue that "seeing the world like a microhistorian" entails grappling with various types of evidence produced in different languages and contexts, the circumstances of their circulation and survival, as well as the ways in which they can be related to each other.12I will follow the method of "tracking the names," proposed in a classic article by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni.13Its application to individuals called by different names in different localities demonstrates how crucial the patient exercise of retrieving connected pieces of information from materials and repositories scattered across continents is to the slower global history that microhistory advocates.14My analysis will start by discussing how the inquisitorial framework in which Gomes's case file was put together indelibly shaped the stories about the Portuguese in the service of Malik 'Ambar included in the document.I will next look at the fragmentary information about some of these mercenaries which can be found in reports written by VOC and EIC agents and representatives.The networks which runaways used when joining -or fleeing -the Nizam Shahi army will then be investigated.This will lead us to consider sources in Persian and Marathi, where specific Portuguese mercenaries have -exceptionally -left traces.A whole world will be revealed in which adventurers of modest origin, at a time of meagre opportunities, sought to earn a living at the fringes of the Portuguese empire despite the endemic state of war in the north-western Deccan region.Though few among them rose to high military and administrative positions in Ahmadnagar, these individuals ultimately provided an example of endurance and adaptation.Loyalty could always be negotiated, yet the networks which assisted the mercenaries remained largely based on the personal contacts they had in Portuguese territory.

Fiction in the Inquisitorial Archives: Renegade Tales and Their Tellers
Recently appointed as prosecutor of the Goa Inquisition, Gaspar Cardoso de Sampaio did not have time to sit around at the beginning of 1628.There were about one hundred people on trial.15Yet, in late January, he requested permission to bring charges against a man called Gaspar Gomes de Faria, whose remains lay buried in the local Convent of São Domingos.16 The inquisitors complained about the prosecutor's excess of zeal and errors, which they attributed to his lack of experience.17Nevertheless, they authorized Cardoso to collect evidence before they consulted Lisbon about Gomes's indictment, which they did not support.In line with the inquisitorial practice, a "true copy" of the proceedings was made on March 13, 1628, three days before the departure of the Calvário.18Its creation and shipping are all the more important because the original trials of the Portuguese tribunal in India do not survive.19 As the duplicate of a case file created between January and March 1628, our document contains a variety of materials from the secret archive of the Goa Inquisition.These include extracts from the depositions given by six runaways between 1612 and 1626, the transcript of two sessions that Gomes had with the inquisitors late in 1625, and, finally, the copies of private letters and other papers that Gomes handed in as proof that he had never repudiated the Catholic faith when he lived in Ahmadnagar.Basically, these records resulted from the standard procedure set out by the Inquisition in consultation with the Crown for subjects who had spent time in Muslim lands.20For both the authorities, they were "renegades," a term commonly used in the Mediterranean context for Christian captives who converted to Islam.21According to Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, however, the arrenegado in Portuguese Asia "was not a definite apostate from the Christian religion; he was, above all, the traitor, the betrayer of the fatherland."22 Gomes's arrival in Goa, presumably in October 1625, hardly went unnoticed.The sight of Gomes, a man in his fifties carried on a golden palanquin and protected from the sun by a silk umbrella in the manner of the local Portuguese nobles scandalized "the people," that is, the minority of Portuguese settlers in a cosmopolitan city of slightly less than one hundred thousand inhabitants.It is difficult to say what annoyed those who grumbled about Gomes -perhaps the fact that he was a mestiço whose public behavior challenged social conventions and racial hierarchies.The inquisitors reacted by ordering him to be "more sober" when appearing in public.23At the time they had been gathering information about Gomes for more than a decade from runaways returning from Ahmadnagar.24 Mainly young and destitute mestiços, most of them came from the Portuguese territory called the Província do Norte, a coastal strip of land from the Gulf of Cambay to the area immediately south of present-day Mumbai.25 The region, separated from the Deccan by the Sahyadri Range (Western Ghats), was dotted with port cities, including Chaul, the place Gomes was originally from.This urban area on the north bank at the mouth of the Kundalika River was divided into two distinct centers separated by groves of palms and other fruit trees, Upper Chaul, which looked to the hinterland and belonged to the Nizam Shahi sultanate, and Lower Chaul (Revdanda), which was nearer to the sea and under Portuguese control.26 Once they came before the inquisitors in Goa, runaways crafted narratives about their life in Muslim lands which confirmed the stereotype of the renegade.The way in which they resorted to fictional elements is reminiscent of the pardon tales of murderers studied by Natalie Zemon Davis for sixteenth-century France.27Those who returned from the Deccan were expected to make a confession according to an interpretative scheme in order to be absolved and reconciled with the Church.The Portuguese in the service of Malik 'Ambar are thus invariably depicted as wearing turbans and tunics, going to the mosque together, marrying local women, and having Muslim names, which are very rarely recorded.Their world is marked by violence and transgression of sexual norms.When details are given, they are usually inconsistent or imprecise.Several references are made to the wife that Gomes is said to have left somewhere in Portuguese territory.Similarly, his hometown is variously identified as Chaul, Daman, or Bassein, all in the Província do Norte.28 Any form of solidarity with other Portuguese is presented as subject to conversion to Islam, a rite of passage described as necessary for integration into local society no less than for being admitted into one of the bands of mercenaries.In our particular case, Gomes is pictured as a mighty figure and zealous proselytizer to whom the most reluctant newcomers were sent.He is said not to have allowed runaways in his house until they became Muslims and to have even induced their apostasy by making them take bhang, a cannabis drink.29 Ultimately, he emerges as a military leader whose power was derived from the unconditional obedience to an Islamic ruler.According to a testimony locating him as early as 1610 in Khirki, a model city built near Daulatabad where Malik 'Ambar had recently moved the capital from Junnar, at that time Gomes already had a reputation in Chaul for being "a very rich man thanks to the villages that the king gave him."30A few years later the allegation that Gomes had taken part in distributing the booty from an attack on the Portuguese fort of Agaçaim in the Província do Norte was also circulating in Goa. 31 Gomes was probably aware of the rumors surrounding his person in the Portuguese empire when he asked for a safe-conduct from the Inquisition.This was granted in the spring of 1623, some two and a half years before he arrived in Goa.32In the autumn of 1625 he finally introduced himself to the local inquisitors as the son of a respectable couple of settlers from Chaul.He did not identify himself as a mestiço but significantly avoided specifying his father's ancestry while emphasizing the latter's social honor as someone who had received the habit of the military Order of Christ.Gomes also presented himself as a widower after the death of his first wife, Maria Pereira, from Bassein, who had borne him a daughter now married to a Portuguese settler in Goa.The core of Gomes's narrative consists of his passage to Ahmadnagar and what followed.The story goes that in about 1608, upon his return from a trip to sell horses in Bijapur, he discovered that his property in Chaul had been sold because of debt.He crossed the border again to earn enough to redeem his goods, but after six months he decided to convert to Islam.The tale continues with the usual assimilation into a Muslim space which is only vaguely described.No geographical name is cited, and Malik 'Ambar is generically referred to as "the regent of the land."Exceptionally, Gomes disclosed the title he used as his name in Ahmadnagar -Nusrat Khan (Nacarate Can) -and spoke explicitly of his two new wives and the children whom he had from them.He also confessed to having many "concubines," "twenty women or so that he bought and the others that he seized in his capacity as captain" and with whom "he lived until coming back to our lands."33 Gomes's account of his time as Nusrat Khan concentrates on the political rituals and, above all, the religious ceremonies in which he often participated, despite his allegedly limited understanding of their significance owing to his ignorance of "the Arabic language."What is glaringly absent from this deposition is any specific reference to his career under Malik 'Ambar, which Gomes only incidentally hinted at when alluding to his role as "captain."34Contacts with other renegades are also hidden, except for a brief mention of the mulato Sebastião Pacheco.More emphasis is put on the exchange that Gomes maintained with Portuguese who lived in the empire -essentially a network of people based in Chaul.His friend António Pires was a case in point."Since he was curious of books," Gomes sent him two or three volumes left by an Englishman who passed away in Ahmadnagar.35 Gomes died suddenly of a disease before his case was brought to completion.When the prosecutor, Cardoso, subsequently requested that he be posthumously sentenced as a heretic, which would have involved disinterring his body from sacred ground and confiscating his assets from his heirs, the inquisitors found that the evidence in their possession was not enough.They also pointed out that "as soon as King Malik, whom he served, sent him as governor 33 I quote from his depositions of 27 October and 5 November 1625 (Processo Gomes, fols.34r-40r).34 Deposition of 27 October 1625 (Processo Gomes, fol.35v).

35
Deposition of 5 November 1625 (Processo Gomes, fol.39r-v).and captain-general to the lands of that king which border with ours, he immediately left with a lot of people that he took with him, who were baptized, and then presented himself to this tribunal."Ultimately, it came down to a matter of pragmatism.Even if the accusations against Gomes were true, "inflicting on him a public punishment," wrote the inquisitors in their verdict, "would be greatly detrimental to the good of Christianity, because if renegades saw that a man who left behind so many revenues and properties in the land of the Moors to return to Christendom and had presented himself before this tribunal with a safe-conduct, and yet was harshly sentenced as a heretic, no one else would return from there."36

Locating Portuguese Runaways: Snapshots from Ahmadnagar
Gomes's case file presents us with a set of contrasting images about Portuguese mercenaries.It tells us more about how renegades negotiated their readmission to their empire than what they actually did in Ahmadnagar.Nusrat Khan is portrayed as a disloyal man whose fortune was built on betrayals, epitomized by the abandonment of his wife, the giving of drugs to intoxicate former coreligionists, and even his involvement in raids on Portuguese possessions -these took place before October 1615, when a tripartite treaty was signed with Ahmadnagar and Bijapur which put an end, among other things, to a series of local skirmishes in the Chaul area and declared that the Dutch and English should be kept out of Nizam Shahi territory.37 The runaways who accused Gomes evoked a confusing and dangerous world in which their usual identity markers, such as clothing and Christianity, simply ceased to exist.They tried to put their own actions into perspective.Once all official ties with the Portuguese empire had dissolved, even converting to Islam could be seen as, if not acceptable, at least inevitable.Isolation made entering the entourage of another renegade appear the lesser evil.Overall, we are able to piece together a picture of a sizable presence of Portuguese in the service of Malik 'Ambar, among whom Gomes reached a leading position.This information is already more than what is usually available on the lived experience of runaways, but inquisitorial sources alone do not give us access to the trajectories and networks of the individuals to which they refer.

36
The verdict was issued on 2 March 1628 (Processo Gomes, fols.41r-44v Portuguese mercenaries had a reputation as skilled artillerymen and their service was in high demand.They were so assimilated into the plural society of the Deccan in the Persianate age that their presence goes almost unmentioned in local sources, which show a general lack of interest in the Portuguese and their empire.38Obviously this is not the case with the VOC and the EIC, which had recently started penetrating into Western India and were to establish the main base of their operations in Surat, a major seaport and trading center under Mughal rule in the Gulf of Cambay.They aimed at supplanting Portuguese dominance over maritime trade, as well as developing new commercial partnerships with the consent of local powers.39Abundant information on the Portuguese is included in their records, however there are only sporadic references to those who served Muslim rulers as mercenaries. The tripartite treaty of 1615 did not prevent the Dutch merchant Pieter van den Broecke, the future chief of the VOC establishment at Surat, from visiting Malik 'Ambar in Khirki in the final months of 1617.The two had a friendly meeting, despite the hostility that "some Portuguese arnegados" in attendance showed to van den Broecke.His travel journal offers a vivid eyewitness description of the group: "Look at that proud dog [Vede iste suberbe can!]," they are said to have exclaimed at the sight of the Dutch merchant, who evidently could understand their Portuguese.These mercenaries were held in high esteem by Malik 'Ambar, as is evidenced by their request to be granted the command of a contingent with three thousand to five thousand horses, as well as the frank and direct way in which they warned the regent against his guest: "This dog comes to spy; watch out."Van den Broecke depicted Khirki as a place where "one can buy everything one can imagine," despite a devastating raid carried out by the Mughals in the previous month of February.Every year Malik 'Ambar brought together a vast and diverse army to confront his enemies.The majority of these forces were Marathas and Habashis, as Africans were collectively known in western India.Among foreign combatants, van den Broecke noted, "there were many Portuguese … who had all converted to Islam."The most powerful among them were rewarded with money and villages, or an income.Nusrat Khan was almost surely one of these mercenary captains, even if the only one singled out by van den Broecke was "Mansour Gaen, a half-caste from India."40Mansur Khan is well known to scholars, although no Portuguese sources on him have been identified and even his original name remains unknown.41The EIC archives, nonetheless, allow us to document at least one connection between Mansur Khan and Nusrat Khan.This concerns the case of a qafila of 350 camels which the EIC loaded with goods in Agra, the capital of the Mughal empire.Careful preparations and agreements did not suffice to guarantee a safe trip to the caravan.The preferred route to Surat passed through the valley of the Tapti River and the city of Burhanpur, in Khandesh, which had been under Mughal control for almost twenty years but in the final months of 1620 was under siege from the Nizam Shahi army.When written assurances were received, the English convoy was ordered to leave Mandu, the ancient capital of Malwa, where it had paused for a time.42Word reached Surat on March 15, 1621 of an assault on the caravan, with many being "wounded in its defence."43It took some time to clarify that the attack had been orchestrated by Mansur Khan autonomously.In early September, his defection to Shahjahan (Prince Khurram), the future Mughal emperor (r.1628-1658), became known to the English factors in Agra, who informed their superiors in Surat.44The EIC representative, Robert Jeffries, was presumably unaware of the role of Mansur Khan in the incident when he set out from Chaul in the company of Khwaja Daud, a Nizam Shahi dignitary who escorted him to the Daulatabad area, where they arrived on October 25.45 Jeffries was tasked with reaching a settlement with Malik 'Ambar on the damages caused by the loss of the qafila.None other than Nusrat Khan was among those who contributed to making Jeffries's mission fail.
Portuguese renegades have a central place in Jeffries's accounts of his mission to Ahmadnagar.46 On their first encounter, Malik 'Ambar spoke through a Portuguese interpreter, while Jeffries answered directly in Portuguese.He Bible, which he quickly returned, saying "that it was in Castilian" because he could not read it.53According to Figueiredo, Pacheco and Gomes were at the head of two separate groups.Not only did family ties encourage Azevedo and his mulato companion's transfer to Ahmadnagar, but they also facilitated their prompt integration into Pacheco's band of mercenaries.Every man who could fight, however, had a value.Therefore, once abandoned, Figueiredo became perfect prey for Gomes.54Azevedo's move to the Nizam Shahi sultanate may well have been engineered by his brother Pacheco through written communication.Exchanging letters was a determining factor in maintaining mercenary networks across the Província do Norte and the Deccan, as is shown by Figueiredo's detailed and extensive accounts upon his second return from Ahmadnagar.It was the summer of 1626.Gomes had passed away.Figueiredo must have thought that his own declaration could not harm him anymore.He thus disclosed that the two had developed a strong bond between 1617 and 1619, which was the main reason why he soon resumed his service with Gomes.Having enlisted in the Portuguese fleet which was stationed off the coast of the Província do Norte, during a stop in Chaul, Figueiredo was reached by a foot soldier with a letter from Gomes, who was somehow aware of his recent arrival.Gomes asked Figueiredo to "join" him in Ahmadnagar.He also promised that the two would be together "when he would go back to our lands," thus attesting that his intention to return to the Portuguese empire dates at least from the early 1620s.55Figueiredo stayed with Gomes when the latter held the position of captain (thanadar) of the southern fort of Parenda, which had previously been the Nizam Shahi capital in the early seventeenth century.56He also formed part of the large group which traveled back to Chaul with Gomes in mid-1625.Things, however, turned out badly for Figueiredo.He fell off his horse, was captured, then handed back to Malik 'Ambar, whose death in May 1626 gave him one Marcocci Journal of early modern history 27 (2023) 59-82 their houses."He asked Gomes for "a letter with a safe-conduct" and declared even to be resolved to pay a sum of money as security.59 We do not know if Gomes really wrote in Saraiva's support, but six years later we find the latter at the court of Ahmadnagar where he served as an informant of the Portuguese viceroy, Dom Miguel de Noronha (r.1629-1635), at the same time as being the Nizam Shahi procurator in Chaul.60 Gomes established himself as an influential broker in the military labor market of the frontier society to which he belonged, as well as a trusted leader with a coterie of arrenegados who followed him from one fortress to another in Ahmadnagar.Figures such as Nusrat Khan and Mansur Khan acted as magnets for Portuguese mercenaries.Tales about their achievements circulated widely, at least in Goa and Chaul.The cases of Gomes's nephew, Lobo, or the brothers Pacheco and Azevedo also highlight how important kinship was in shaping the networks of those who deserted the Portuguese empire.The decision to leave was not necessarily an easy one and was often motivated by poverty and debt, not to mention problems with the law.Even those who could speak some Marathi or Dakhani, once they had crossed the border, needed to know where to go and to quickly learn how to fit into a military life which was not without rules and risks.In a context in which allegiance was fluid and many were known by more than one name, letters were much more than a means of communication; they were indispensable in proving one's identity or saving their life.61Marcocci Journal of early modern history 27 (2023)  name but also refers to him as "the mulato from Coimbra."It is thanks to this designation that we are finally able to identify Mansur Khan and his brother Maghrur with Sebastião Pacheco and Cipriano de Azevedo respectively, which also demonstrates that the link between Nusrat Khan and Mansur Khan was a strong one.Andrade even offers a brief account of Mansur Khan's valiant death in action, in July 1623, in the Malwa region, where Shahjahan's forces had converged.66A less honorable version can be read in Jahangir's memoirs, according to which, being drunk on wine, Mansur Khan suddenly decided to give chase to a small contingent of Maratha cavalrymen (bargirs) seen in the distance; he ventured too far and ended up being killed by troops ironically commanded by Malik 'Ambar's former general, Jadu Rai.67 Mansur Khan entered the turbulent world of the Mughals on his own initiative.Being in the service of Shahjahan and Jahangir meant that he fought alongside feared antagonists of the Portuguese in India.However, this did not prevent him from dealing with other Portuguese.His meeting with Father Andrade occurred in Ajmer, presumably in May or June 1623.The Jesuit's account is made more dramatic by Mansur Khan's alleged promise that the expedition against Shahjahan would be his last campaign, after which he would publicly return to Catholicism.What is notable in this otherwise standard conversion narrative is that Mansur Khan's plans seem to have never included a return to Portuguese territory.68Nusrat Khan was not excluded from Catholic missionary networks either.At the time of Mansur Khan's death in the Mughal empire, Nusrat Khan had made progress in his project to get back home thanks to a safe-conduct from the Inquisition.He had possibly asked for it through the friars of the Franciscan province of the Capuchos, with whom he maintained a correspondence while in Ahmadnagar signing his letters as Gomes.A new appointment closer to the border with the Província do Norte in a north-western district (sarkar) of the Nizam Shahi sultanate may be the reason behind his petition for a letter of recommendation from the provincial of the Capuchos in Chaul, which was made available to Gomes in the summer of 1624.Included in Gomes's case file, the missive depicts him as a most devoted benefactor and is addressed to the Capuchos in Daman.They were urged to be of assistance should Gomes, or someone of his entourage, arrive in town and ask "for friars to accompany him, to stay in their convent or whatever else he needed."69Nusrat Khan's personal papers must have included many credentials and letters of transit in the final months of his stay in Ahmadnagar.Crossing the border with the Portuguese empire was a dangerous matter for someone in the public eye like him.If he did not participate in the battle of Bhatvadi (September 1624), he certainly stayed in touch with Malik 'Ambar in the following period when the regent used the recent victory to consolidate his political and military position in the Deccan.Nusrat Khan had to act with the greatest prudence.On June 1, 1625, he answered a letter from the guardian of Madre de Deus, the convent of the Capuchos in Chaul and, in another remarkable piece of evidence from Gomes's case file, informed him confidentially that he was drawing near the town.Gomes warmly thanked the friars for their prayers, which had allowed him to come so close to his "homeland (patria)," and were now asked to plead with Christ "finally to bring me to a safe harbor, out of all dangers and obstacles that can stand in the way."70The trepidation which can be felt in these lines may result from the deterioration in Malik 'Ambar's relationship with the Portuguese.All we know is that on June 10 the latter came to a truce with the Nizam Shahi resident in Dabhol, which had been wrested from Bijapur earlier that year.71An explicit reference to Nusrat Khan in a Nizam Shahi document adds a further detail to this reconstruction.Towards the end of June, Malik 'Ambar wrote a response to the revenue administrator (karkun) of the province (mamla) of Chaul, who had appealed for an extra hundred soldiers because of unspecified machinations of the "Firangis," that is, the Portuguese.Malik 'Ambar approved the request and informed him that Nusrat Khan had recently reached the border in Revdanda.It is unclear on whose initiative he had gone there, but his intention to flee seems to have been unknown to Malik 'Ambar at the time.72It was a tense situation.According to Figueiredo, the night that they moved "from Upper Chaul to our Chaul," Gomes and his large retinue were intercepted "by Moors who wanted to prevent them Marcocci Journal of early modern history 27 (2023) 59-82 from passing."Some were captured, but Gomes and most of his relatives managed to escape to Portuguese territory.73 Years of preparation and dissimulation had preceded the return of Nusrat Khan.It was not a story of loyalty to the Portuguese empire, although Gomes was clearly aware and fully respectful of the institutional procedure that he would have to undergo in order to be lawfully readmitted to Portuguese rule.It is also hard to believe that his decision was motivated by nostalgia for his birthplace, despite the patriotic feelings for Chaul expressed in the heartfelt letter to the local Capuchos when approaching the town.We may, however, concede some desire to retreat into private life in a man who had spent more than half of his adulthood in a foreign land.Family was important to Gomes.He had started a new one in Ahmadnagar but still had at least one brother in Chaul, to whom he gifted a negrinha (dark-skinned female servant) on his return.Moreover, in Goa where he would purchase "houses" in a coconut grove, he could be together again with a daughter from his first marriage who lived there.74 Gomes was the head of a patriarchal household.The large and diverse group that he brought back with him included a son and two daughters, all born in Ahmadnagar, as well as enslaved women, servants, concubines, and many children.He had judiciously made a missionary baptize all of them before crossing the border, with the exception of one of his Muslim wives and their two-year-old daughter who therefore were left behind together with other women and servants -possibly a clue to a rushed departure.75 The meeting of Gomes's new family with his older daughter and her husband, Francisco Almeida de Gouveia, did not go well, despite Gomes trying to please his son-in-law by offering him another negrinha.Soon after Gomes showed up in front of the Inquisition, Almeida being the "grave and honest Portuguese" he was, informed the tribunal through a Jesuit that "he does not find in the house of his father-in-law the evidence of conversion that he wishes."76Only Gomes's death prevented the denunciation from going ahead.Returning to the empire was not without its dangers for Portuguese mercenaries and their families.

Conclusion
The stories of Mansur Khan and Nusrat Khan were ones of struggle and changing fortunes.The two renegades were, in this at least, representative of the majority of Portuguese runaways.What is really exceptional in the case study presented in this article is the paper trail left by the return of Nusrat Khan.Once the fictional elements in the inquisitorial materials have been carefully identified, scrutinized, and combined with other sources produced independently, we are able to rescue the mestiço Gaspar Gomes de Faria, the mulato Sebastião Pacheco, and a few others from an otherwise anonymous multitude of mercenaries in seventeenth-century India.The unique opportunity to analyze their networks at close range reveals an attitude towards the Portuguese empire which does not match a flat picture of circumvention and exploitation.Rather, a microhistorical examination of their cross-border mobility raises the general question of how everyday actors faced rapid and disruptive changes brought about locally by imperial rivalry and long-distance commerce in the early modern world.
Detailed studies of Portuguese runaways in sixteenth-century Asia are based on a critical reading of chronicles and other official documents.77These sources, however, are silent about mercenaries like Gomes and Pacheco because they did not serve, even indirectly, the Portuguese Crown.Yet the elusive relationship with the world they came from is exactly what makes their cases worthy of special attention.Nusrat Khan, Mansur Khan, and other less successful renegades were attracted by the possibility of improving their low status and difficult material conditions but were also deeply immersed in the plural society of the north-western Deccan, where they systematically embraced Islam, at least outwardly.This poses the problem of their cultural and religious trajectories and how these depended on interaction with specific contexts and circumstances, however inextricably merged with processes that were global in nature.
Portuguese mercenary networks were interstitial and largely determined the unfolding of the relationship that renegades developed with the frontier zone across which they moved and in which, more often than not, one's destiny

On
March 31, 1629 the carrack Bom Jesus do Monte Calvário entered Lisbon harbor after a long, perilous voyage across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.The ship had left Goa, the capital of Portuguese Asia on the western seaboard Downloaded from Brill.com 11/02/2023 06:49:59PM via Open Access.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Marcocci Journal of early modern history 27 (2023) 59-82